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"Curt Monash possesses the rare
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Known-Spam-Blocking:The Best Anti-Spam Technology

Spam can be disguised in many ways, but it has one
unalterable characteristic:Spam is sent to
many email addresses.In our opinion,
the best approach to spam-blocking is one based on this fact.Any email sent to enough different mailboxes is
either spam, or a legitimate commercial email.(Most
likely, its spam.)Conversely, if you
monitor enough mailboxes, youll see multiple instances of any serious incident of
spam.

This isnt just theory.One of my internet service providers, Earthlink,
is doing a great job of spam blocking right now.I
get several hundred spams per day at my main email address.Earthlink blocks 95% of this (the last time I
actually counted they had blocked 458 out of 481 spam) and sends this to a Known
Spam folder.And Ive never
detected a single false positive.

What we particularly like about known-spam-blocking is
that the technique is likely to keep working no matter what new tricks spammers come up
with.And any tricks they develop that do
confuse known-spam-blockers are likely to pose trouble for other spam-blocking
technologies as well, whitelists possibly excepted.

There are four basic parts to a
known-spam-blockers capabilities:

1.Harvesting the messages.If you set up dummy mailboxes, then
anything sent to them is either an error or spam.Also,
if you operate a lot of email accounts, anything sent to a whole lot of them is probable
spam.

Both these approaches to spam harvesting are obviously
easy for internet service providers and email outsourcers.Third-party
anti-spam software and service providers need access to a sufficient number of mailboxes
in order to compete, but thats not a terribly high hurdle.

2.Identifying when different email
messages are really the same.Serious
spammers randomize certain aspects of their messages (hence those strings of nonsense
characters right in the title of some spam) so as to defeat na´ve spam blockers.An effective spam blocker has to see through the
randomization and recognize patterns or signatures that are common to different instances
of the same spam.

One way for the spam-blocking software to do this is to
look at the call-to-action.Spam is sent with
the goal of getting the recipient to click on a link, call a phone number, write to an
address (email or snail), or maybe buy a stock.This
action target will almost certainly be fairly consistent across many instances of the
spam.

Another way is for the spam-blocker to do a rough
analysis of the overall text.Some words may
change; but the overall content will be pretty similar from instance to instance.This approach should continue to work well for all
except the most purely graphical spam.

As for the graphical spam  well, most email
thats graphics-only is probably spam in the first place.And that -- er, that illustrates the next
part.

3.Incorporate other spam-blocking techniques.No one spam-blocking technique is sufficient
on its own.You can identify the vast
majority of spam by tracking it across multiple mailboxes, but a sufficiently bizarre kind
of email could slip through unblocked.The
most obvious example I can come up with right now is the all-too-common graphics-heavy
HTML email, but no doubt other examples will arise over time.

Hence, to build a really robust known-spam-blocker, you
need a capability for bizarre-email-identification, or some other way of blocking those
spams that would otherwise slip through the cracks.For a discussion of other spam-blocking techniques, please see a
companion article.

4.Integrate nicely into your email system.Any
kind of spam-blockers needs to play nicely with your email software.Right now, for example, Earthlinks great
spam-blocker only works with Earthlinks pathetically slow webmail system, and hence
I dont really use it.Instead, I just
download my mail and let my far inferior client-based spam blockers do what they
can.

So, given that known-spam-blocking is the best
technique, which vendor should you use?Actually,
were still researching that, and will update this page when we have an answer.In the mean time, please click here for a companion article on other spam-blocking techniques,
or here for other articles on internet technologies, or contact us if youre interested in our
technology and marketing consulting services.